


Chinese Whispers

by Trash



Category: Nine Inch Nails (Band)
Genre: M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 09:50:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hard to understand how they got so far from the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chinese Whispers

The entire thing becomes general knowledge because of a handful of over heard conversations so nobody is one hundred percent sure what the fuck is going on but Robin is back. And there’s some sketchy details as to the why, where and how of it all but one thing that everybody is saying is that he is pregnant.

Nobody wants to be that guy. The one who can’t just say “I’m happy for you” and instead brings up the father. But eventually it’s Ally who grows a pair and confronts Robin about it. 

“So,” he says, “you’re knocked up?”

Robin looks up from where is filling in a cereal box maze to nod, smiling placidly.

There’s an awkward pause that only Ally seems to notice during which he watches Robin’s pen trace a line along the back of the box and he thinks of blood, he thinks of abortions, he thinks of babies left to rot in trash cans at high school proms. Then he asks, “Who is the father?”

“Trent,” Robin says, “will be raising the baby with me. That’s all you really need to know.”

Ally wants to say something else, but the bus does and emergency stop and he staggers and falls, hitting his head on the corner of the kitchen counter. He lays stricken on the floor, almost unconscious. And in this little limbo, half way between awake and asleep, he thinks he hears Trent speaking.

Thinks he hears, “Did you tell him?” And then silence. A menacing laugh, quiet enough to be nothing at all and then Trent maybe says “Good.” And then Ally passes out.

***

After that nobody asks. Trent mostly avoids all of them, Robin included, but anybody unlucky enough to get the room next to theirs in the hotel has to listen to the hard packing sound of a clenched fist against bare skin all night long.

This is like back in the day, when their day didn’t so much revolve around the live show as much as it revolved around picking Robin up from wherever Trent left him and cleaning up the blood. Back then, though, Robin gave as much as he got. 

The break from touring comes when the swell of Robin’s stomach is too big for his guitar to fit over and he flies home. Trent goes with him, initially. Nobody knows if this is Robin’s idea or not. Not that they’d argue either way, Trent has all of a sudden become the scary anti-social motherfucker he was when he was on drugs, and nobody is willing to mess with him.

Especially not Robin. At first.

“Surely there’s some people from Cirque who would be willing to raise the kid,” Trent says as he dumps his bag on Robin’s bedroom floor. “Surely they’ll lap it up.”

“It’s not that kind of a circus, Trent.” Robin tells him. “And besides; what happened to you wanting to raise this child.”

“We’re on tour. A baby would disrupt the harmony we have right now.”

“We aren’t on tour right now. So you’re telling me you’d rather have a perfectly oiled machine than a family?”

And without hesitation, Trent says yes.

***

The story is; Robin fell down some stairs.

That’s how he winds up in hospital. He tripped over his feet and fell down the stairs. That’s how the baby dies. 

Or something.

Because this is all very Fight-Club-esque. What with Robin lying on the gurney, the doctors asking what happened and Trent in the background like Tyler Durden saying “He fell down the stairs.”

And like a little puppet, Robin repeats, “I fell down the stairs.”

The baby inside, it’ll probably be born dead. If not it’ll be so brain damaged or deformed it’ll spend its entire life in the hospital. And really, sometimes there are worse things that can happen to a loved one than death.

The rest of the band aren’t allowed into Robin’s hospital room until after his caesarean and his dead or brain dead or deformed baby is taken away and…whatevered. Put on some life support machine or thrown in a trash can, it’s hard to tell which is worse.

By the time they get there Robin is asleep and Trent is sitting with his chin resting on the pillow, watching them enter the room. He looks surprisingly peaceful – Trent, that is, not Robin. Robin, he looks tiny in the hospital bed. Pale. 

Trent looks like this is his happily-ever-after. Which is beyond fucked up. But maybe Robin really did just fall down the stairs. Maybe all of this was really just one big horrible accident and there’s nobody to blame.

The band, they only know as much as they overheard from someone who overheard someone who overheard Trent talking to someone on his cell phone. Their lives have all of a sudden become one big game of Chinese whispers. But there’s the feeling that this situation, this falling down the stairs shit, it’s all so far from the truth.

There’s the feeling like maybe this was all planned from the start.

Ally goes to say something but Trent just brings a finger up to his lips to shush him.

And that’s the end of that.


End file.
